OPINION: My dear grandfather Zigi knew laughter is often a Jew’s best defence

In the aftermath of my grandfather’s death, we were inundated with messages of condolence. The royal family, Arsenal football club and other less problematic institutions reached out to let our family know what Zigi meant to them.

Students, teachers and academics spoke of hearing the man share his testimony and the profound effect it had on the course of their lives. One tribute in particular stood out when it arrived in the form of a direct message on Twitter from a journalist:

“I would never share this story in a more public setting, but for you, as his grandson…

“I was covering a Yom Hashoah event once and I was at his table, talking to him and a few other survivors. A waitress came around with some cake and gave one of the other survivors a slice that was on the small size. Zigi turned to her and said, “Give him another or he’ll think he’s back in the camps!” My face.

“I mean, no-one else in the WORLD could make that joke.”

Zigi would not have thought twice about making that joke and nor should he have done. At his talks, he would stress that he did not want people to leave feeling bereft but would much rather make them laugh and get the sense that the man stood before them loved life. Judging by the messages we received and the manifold talks I attended, he successfully made people laugh while also making clear the true horrors of the Holocaust. In a sense, he did the same with the joke.

Mel Brooks has spent a lifetime satirising Nazis but was appalled by the Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful because he felt no comedy film should take place, even in part, within a concentration camp.

As Zigi’s grandson and a man who’s spent the better part of the last couple of decades thinking about humour and how it works, the cake comment caused me to reflect on the ways in which humour and the holocaust are more entwined than one might assume.

Mel Brooks has spent a lifetime satirising Nazis but was appalled by the Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful because he felt no comedy film should take place, even in part, within a concentration camp. We each have our own set of rules but it would be impossible to claim Zigi hadn’t earned the right to make his joke.

The American Jewish comic Richard Belzer told a version of the following joke in one of his final recorded interviews earlier this year:

Cohen lives in Berlin in 1933. He’s walking along the street one day when Hitler drives up in a Volkswagen and leaps out with a Luger pistol in his hand.  He snarls: “Get down in the gutter and eat the filth like the dog you are, Jew!”

Cohen has no choice but to obey and eat the filth. Hitler is so amused by what he sees that he drops the gun and Cohen senses his opportunity, picks it up and says, “Your turn, mein Führer.”

Later that night Cohen returns home and his wife asks how his day went.

“Not bad. You’ll never guess who I had lunch with!”

Belzer died a month after my grandfather and his last words, after years of ill health, were reportedly, “F*** you, motherf***er.” This heady cocktail of defiance and humour in the face of death seems to me particularly Jewish. It is unsurprising he told the Hitler gag so close to the end since it reflects his mood as clearly as George Orwell’s words on the page in his race against time to finish 1984 before his demise. The joke opens ominously and builds in intensity before providing the kind of release and relief so rarely found in real life with its unlikely scene of convivial domesticity. Jokes, by and large, tend to have more joyful endings than lives.

Saul Bellow wrote that, “In Jewish stories laughter and trembling are so curiously intermingled that it is not easy to determine the relation of the two” and that is undeniably true of the jokes told by the aforementioned legends.

Until all the fascists are scrabbling around in the dirt for real, the best option is to laugh.